Warner Brothers fired a legal strike over the weekend, against a screenwriter who claims the studio stole and repackaged a script he commissioned for what eventually became a 2012 movie starring Eastwood, Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake.

Audiences were underwhelmed by the story of a crusty baseball scout teaming up with his daughter to check out a promising player. It grossed an estimated $35m in the US. But the dispute has gathered an audience.

“As boring as this all sounds, rest assured, it is significantly more engaging than Trouble with the Curve,” said Gawker.

Ryan Brooks, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and producer, started the fight over the film last October, when he filed a copyright infringement complaint against Warner Brothers, Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions, the United Talent Agency, the Gersh Agency, director Robert Lorenz and writer Randy Brown, claiming they had stolen and camouflaged his own work.

The 120-page suit sought tens of millions of dollars in damages and a share of profits, on the grounds that Brooks and writer Don Handfield had conceived the story in an unproduced script titled Omaha.

The suit said: “This case is about a conspiracy to steal the body, structure, theme, and soul of a unique, original, copyrighted screenplay from a production company and its owner … this was a racket, in the sense of intentional, illegal activity.”

Warner Brothers denied any wrongdoing and told Brooks’ legal team to drop the case or be countersued for malicious prosecution. Brown, the film’s credited writer, said he wrote it in 1997.

In January, Brooks’ lawyers, representing his company Gold Glove Productions, raised the stakes by filing documents to a US district court alleging that Warner Brothers doctored floppy disks submitted as evidence, to make it seem that they predated his screenplay and concept reel.

On Saturday the studio hit back, with a reply brief which rejected the allegations and attacked the credibility of Brooks’ investigators: “The court need not address these sideshow attacks to grant this motion or bring this wasteful case to its much needed end.”

A hearing is set for 24 February. “You might want to bring a mask as well as a glove because lawyers on both sides are going to be throwing a lot around,” said Deadline.com.

Eastwood, 83, meanwhile, has been credited with saving a man’s life at a dinner on the eve of a golf tournament near his home town of Carmel, in northern California. The tournament director, Steve John, told the Carmel Pine Cone a piece of cheese got lodged in his throat and he could not breathe.

“It was as bad as it could have been,” he said. “But Clint came up behind me, and he knew exactly what to do. He … lifted me right off the ground. Clint saved my life.”

The veteran actor said it had taken “three good jolts” to clear John’s airway.

“I looked in his eyes and saw that look of panic people have when they see their life passing before their very eyes,” he said. “It looked bad.”